The civilization of ancient Sumer, its sudden appearance produced an effect on humanity comparable to a nuclear explosion: a block of historical knowledge shattered into hundreds of small fragments, and years passed before this monolith could be put together in a new way.
The Sumerians, who practically did not “exist” one and a half hundred years before the heyday of their civilization, gave humanity so much that many are still wondering: did they really exist? And if they were, why did they disappear into the darkness of centuries with uncomplaining dumbness?
Until the middle of the 19th century, no one knew anything about the Sumerians. Those finds that were later recognized as Sumerian were at first attributed to other periods and other cultures. And this defies explanation: a rich, well-organized, "powerful" civilization has gone so deep into the "underground" that it is contrary to logic. Moreover, the achievements of ancient Sumer, as it turned out, are so impressive that it is almost impossible to “hide” them, just as it is impossible to remove Egyptian pharaohs, Mayan pyramids, Etruscan tombstones, Jewish antiquities from the history.
Uplifting deception?
After the phenomenon of the Sumerian civilization became a generally accepted fact, many of the researchers recognized their right to "cultural birthright". The greatest expert on Sumer, Professor Samuel Noah Cramer, in one of his books summed up this phenomenon by declaring that "history begins in Sumer." The professor did not sin against the truth - he counted the number of objects, the right of discovery of which belongs to the Sumerians, and found that there were at least thirty-nine of them. And most importantly, what items! If someone from ancient civilizations invented one thing, then he would go down in history forever! And here as many as 39 (!), And one is more significant than the other!
The Sumerians invented the wheel, parliament, medicine and many other things that we use to this day. 
Judge for yourself: in addition to the first writing system, the Sumerians invented a wheel, a school, a bicameral parliament, historians, something like a newspaper or magazine, which historians called the Farmer's Almanac. They were the first to study cosmogony and cosmology, collected a collection of proverbs and aphorisms, introduced literary debates, invented money, taxes, issued laws, carried out social reforms, invented medicine (the recipes by which we get medicine in pharmacies also first appeared in ancient Sumer ). They also created a real literary hero, who in the Bible received the name Noah, and the Sumerians called him Ziudsura. It first appeared in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh long before the Bible was written.
Some Sumerian undertakings are still used by people and are admired. For example, medicine had a very high level. In Nineveh (one of the Sumerian cities) they found a library in which there was a whole medical department: about a thousand clay tablets! You can imagine - the most complex medical procedures were described in special reference books, which talked about hygiene rules, about operations, even about cataract removal and the use of alcohol for disinfection during surgical operations! And all this happened around 3500 BC - that is, more than fifty centuries ago!
Given the antiquity, when all this happened, it is very difficult to comprehend other achievements of a civilization hidden in the interfluve of the Tigris and Euphrates.
The Sumerians were fearless travelers and outstanding sailors who built the world's first ships. One of the inscriptions excavated in the city of Lagash tells how to repair ships and lists the materials that the local ruler brought for the construction of the temple. There was everything from gold, silver, copper to diorite, carnelian and cedar. 
What can I say: the first brick kiln was also built in Sumer! They also invented a technology for smelting metals from ore, such as copper - for this, the ore was heated to a temperature of over 800 degrees in a closed furnace with a low oxygen supply. This process, called smelting, was carried out when the supply of natural native copper was exhausted. Surprisingly, these innovative technologies were mastered by the Sumerians several centuries after the emergence of civilization.
And in general, the Sumerians produced all their discoveries and inventions within a very short time - one hundred and fifty years! Other civilizations during this period of time are just getting on their feet, taking their first steps, and the Sumerians, like a non-stop conveyor belt, delivered examples of inventive thought and brilliant discoveries to the world. Looking at all this, many questions involuntarily arise, the first of which is: what kind of wonderful, mythical people are they who came from nowhere, gave a lot of useful things - from a wheel to a bicameral parliament - and went into the unknown, leaving behind practically no traces?
Unique writing - cuneiform is also an invention of the Sumerians. The Sumerian cuneiform for a long time did not give in to the solution, until it was taken up by English diplomats, and at the same time by scouts.
Judging by the list of achievements, the Sumerians were the founders of the civilization from which history began its record. And if so, then it makes sense to take a closer look at them in order to understand how this became possible? Where did this enigmatic ethnic group draw material for inspiration from?
low truths.
There are many versions about where the Sumerians came from and where their homeland is located, but this mystery has not been finally resolved. Let's start with the fact that even the name "Sumers" appeared recently - they themselves called themselves blackheads (why is also unclear). However, the fact that their homeland is not Mesopotamia is quite obvious: their appearance, language, culture were completely alien to the tribes that lived in Mesopotamia at that time! Moreover, the Sumerian language is not related to any of the languages that have survived to this day!
Most historians are inclined to believe that the original habitat of the Sumerians was some mountainous area in Asia - it is not without reason that the words "country" and "mountain" are written the same in the Sumerian language. And taking into account their ability to build ships and "be on you" with water, they lived either on the seashore or near it. The Sumerians also came to Mesopotamia by water: at first they appeared in the Tigris delta, and only then they began to develop swampy, uninhabitable shores.
Having drained them, the Sumerians erected a variety of buildings, moreover, on artificial embankments or on terraces made of mud bricks. This method of construction, most likely, is not characteristic of the plains inhabitants. Based on this, scientists have suggested that their homeland is the island of Dilmun (the current name is Bahrain). This island, located in the Persian Gulf, is mentioned in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. The Sumerians called Dilmun their homeland, their ships visited the island, but modern researchers believe that there is no serious evidence that Dilmun was the cradle of ancient Sumer.
Gilgamesh, surrounded by bull-like people, supports a winged disk - a symbol of the Assyrian god Ashur. 
There is a version that the homeland of the Sumerians was India, Transcaucasia and even West Africa. But then it is not clear: why in the notorious Sumerian homeland at that time no special progress was observed, and in Mesopotamia, where the fugitives sailed, there was an unexpected take-off? And what ships, for example, were in the same Transcaucasia? Or in ancient India?
There is a version that the Sumerians are the descendants of the indigenous population of the sunken Atlantis, the Atlanteans. Supporters of this version argue that this island-state died as a result of a volcanic eruption and a giant tsunami that even covered the continent. Despite all the controversy of such a version, it at least explains the mystery of the emergence of the Sumerians.
If we assume that the volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini, located in the Mediterranean Sea, destroyed the civilization of the Atlanteans in its prime, why not assume that part of the population escaped and subsequently settled in Mesopotamia? But the Atlanteans (assuming that it was they who inhabited Santorini) had a highly developed civilization, which was famous for its excellent sailors, architects, doctors who knew how to build a state and manage it.
The most reliable way to establish a relationship between certain peoples is to compare their languages. The connection can be close - then it is considered that the languages belong to the same language group. In this sense, all peoples, including those that have long disappeared, have linguistic relatives among the peoples who live to this day.
But the Sumerians are the only people who do not have linguistic relatives! They are unique and unrepeatable in this! And the decoding of their language and writing was accompanied by a number of circumstances that cannot be called otherwise than suspicious.
British trail.
The most important point in the long chain of circumstances that led to the discovery of ancient Sumer was that it was found not thanks to the curiosity of archaeologists, but in ... the offices of scientists. Alas, the right to discover the most ancient civilization belongs to linguists. Trying to comprehend the secrets of the cuneiform writing, they, like detectives in a detective novel, went on the trail of a hitherto unknown people.
But at first it was nothing more than a guess, until in the middle of the 19th century employees of the British and French consulates took up the search (as you know, most consular employees are professional intelligence officers).
Behistun inscription. 
At first it was an officer of the British army, Major Henry Rawlinson. In 1837-1844, this inquisitive military man, a decipherer of Persian cuneiform, copied the Behistun inscription, a trilingual inscription on a rock between Kermanshah and Hamadan in Iran. This inscription, made in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, was deciphered by the major for 9 years (by the way, a similar inscription was on the Rosetta stone in Egypt, which was found under the guidance of Baron Denon, also a diplomat and intelligence officer, who at one time was exposed for espionage from Russia).
Even then, some scholars suspected that the translation from the Old Persian language was suspicious and similar to the language of the embassy ciphers. But Rawlinson immediately presented scientists with clay dictionaries made by the ancient Persians. It was they who prompted scientists to search for an ancient civilization that exists in these places.
Joined in this search and Ernest de Sarzhak - another diplomat, this time French. In 1877 he found a figurine made in an unknown style. Sarzhak organized excavations in that area and - what do you think? - took out from under the ground a whole pile of unprecedented beauty of artifacts. So one fine day, traces of the people who gave the world the first written language in history were found - both the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and later large city-states of Asia Minor and the Middle East.
Surprising luck also accompanied the former London engraver George Smith, who deciphered the outstanding Sumerian epic about Gilgamesh. In 1872 he worked as an assistant in the Egyptian-Assyrian department of the British Museum. During the deciphering of part of the text written on clay tablets (they were sent to London by Ormuz Rasam, a friend of Rawlinson and also a scout), Smith discovered that a number of tablets describe the exploits of a hero named Gilgamesh. 
He realized that part of the story was missing because several of the tablets were missing. Smith's discovery caused a sensation. The Daily Telegraph even offered £1,000 to anyone who could find the missing pieces of the story. George took advantage of this and went to Mesopotamia. And what do you think? His expedition managed to find 384 tablets, among which was the missing part of the epic, which turned our understanding of the Ancient World upside down.
All these “strangenesses” and “accidents” accompanying the big discovery led to the fact that many supporters of the conspiracy version appeared in the world, which says: ancient Sumer never existed, all this was the work of a brigade of swindlers!
But why did they need it? The answer is simple: in the middle of the 19th century, Europeans decided to firmly establish themselves in the Middle East and Asia Minor, where it clearly smelled of great profit. But to make their presence appear legitimate, a theory was needed to justify their presence. And then a myth appeared about the Indo-Aryans - the white-skinned ancestors of the Europeans, who lived here from time immemorial, before the arrival of the Semites, Arabs and other "unclean". This is how the idea of ancient Sumer arose - a great civilization that existed in Mesopotamia and gave humanity the greatest discoveries.
But then what about clay tablets, cuneiform writing, gold jewelry and other material evidence of the reality of the Sumerians? “All this was collected from a variety of sources,” conspiracy theorists say. “It is not for nothing that the heterogeneity of the cultural heritage of the Sumerians is explained by the fact that each city was a separate state for them - Ur, Lagash, Nineveh.”
However, serious scientists do not pay attention to these objections. Moreover, this, may the ancient Sumer forgive us, is nothing more than a version that you can simply give up on.
The Sumerians are the first human civilization to leave written records. It mysteriously arose in fertile Mesopotamia (between the Tigris and Euphrates) in the 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian language is not related to any of the known ancient and modern languages. Where did this people come from? Sumerian mythology claims that he was cloned by aliens.
The Sumerian civilization is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for supporters of the theory of paleocontacts - UFO visits to earth in antiquity. And this is not surprising, because when talking about this people, you constantly have to use the word "for the first time."
According to historical data, the Sumerians invented many necessary things, for example: the wheel, the potter's wheel, money (originally they looked like small silver ingots), the first written language, borrowed later by other peoples. It was also the Sumerians who, for the first time in the history of mankind, created teaching schools, courts, law, parliament and elections. I wonder how they got to all this on their own, or maybe they were helped?
Sumerian masters amaze with their achievements. They invented the brick kiln and were the first to use this material to build houses, multi-storey palaces and square towers - ziggurats. When the supply of native copper was exhausted, the Sumerians mastered the processes of smelting metals from ores, enriching ore, and casting. For the first time they began to obtain an alloy of copper and tin - bronze, thereby marking the beginning of a new period in the history of mankind - the Bronze Age. Moreover, they were able not only to find tin somewhere, the deposits of which are not in Mesopotamia, but also to extract it from ore - the mineral cassiterite, or tin stone, which is quite difficult from a technical point of view. Finally, they calculated the optimal ratio of the alloy components - 85% copper and 15% tin.
Tens of thousands of Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets have been found in Mesopotamia, many of which have not yet been deciphered. But those that have been deciphered have become a sensation in the scientific world. It turned out that the Sumerians knew all the planets of the solar system, and, unlike many later civilizations, such as Medieval Europe, they believed that the Earth and other planets rotate, and the Sun and stars are stationary. The most accurate astronomical tables for calculating the phases of the moon, solar eclipses, and planetary trajectories were found on burnt pieces of clay.
The Sumerian calendar was also exceptionally accurate. The sexagesimal number system adopted by this / amazing people made it possible to calculate fractions, raise to a power, and extract roots. From the Sumerian calendar, we inherited the division of the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds. The sexagesimal system is based on the division of the day into 24 hours, and the year into 12 months, feet by 12 inches.
Sumerian astronomers and mathematicians introduced the basic concepts of modern spherical astronomy: the division of the celestial sphere into northern, central and southern segments, a 360 ° circle, zenith, horizon, ecliptic, axes of the celestial sphere, poles, equinox. A number of scientists suggest that the Sumerians were aware of precession - the phenomenon of deviation of the earth's axis under the influence of the attraction of the Moon and the Sun. The precession cycle is approximately 26 thousand years. Where did the ancient people get such knowledge and why did they need it?
According to Sumerian knowledge, there are 12 planets in the solar system, one of which is called Nibiru or "crossing planet". It moves in a very elongated elliptical orbit. And every 3600 years it approaches a record small distance from the Earth, thereby approaching both Mars and Jupiter, after which it disappears back into the dark depths of the universe. The Anunaki, the Sumerian gods, live on this planet. This is a highly developed civilization of centenarians, whose age by earthly standards reaches 360 thousand years. They have visited Earth many times in the past and set up gold mining on it, necessary to protect the collapsing atmosphere of their home planet. Once every 3600 years, at the moments of closest approach to the Earth, the Anunaki reloaded the mined gold to Nibiru. Gradually, dissatisfaction grew among the miners that they had to do unskilled hard labor in the mines. Then the leaders of the expedition, the supreme gods Anu and Enlil, decided on a bold experiment to create assistants - earthly people.
Clay tablets detail how Enlil took a monkey egg and mixed into it "that which binds memory" (in modern parlance, a DNA molecule) extracted from specially purified Anunaki blood. A certain "soul" was added to the egg, also isolated from the body of the Anunaki. The prepared egg was placed in the uterus of the "donor" - the goddess Ninti ("giving life"). It is said about her that she constantly washed her hands - that is, the experiment required complete sterility.
After a long gestation of the fetus and a caesarean section, a man was born. So that the human race could reproduce on its own, the first woman was cloned from the tissues of the body of the first man. Alien geneticists shared with their wards the knowledge necessary for successful economic activity and the development of new territories.
Any civilization that is thousands of years old has plenty of its mysteries and unresolved mysteries. There are still a great many of them even in ancient civilization, about which scientists, thanks to written sources and large-scale archaeological research, know a lot. What can we say about the Sumerians, who created their highly developed society about five thousand years ago and were ancient and mysterious even in relation to the same ancient Greeks or Romans. However, when it comes to the mysteries of the Sumerians, one must clearly distinguish between scientific mysteries and sensational "mysteries" ...
Have aliens arrived?
First of all, thanks to articles distributed on the Web, the concept of “mystery” became associated with the Sumerian civilization. 
primarily in the light of the hypothesis of its extraterrestrial origin. That is, no one claims that the Sumerians themselves were aliens. 
, however, it is suggested that only the carriers of an advanced culture comparable in terms of development to modern human culture could give the Sumerians knowledge and technology. The most commonly used arguments are:
Were there any aliens?
But no matter how fascinating such prospects may seem - a civilization ahead of its time by five thousand years - upon objective consideration of the above "arguments", it turns out that they are of little value and certainly cannot be considered as evidence of the alien origin of the Sumerian civilization. First of all, myths about the divine, supernatural origin of knowledge and culture are characteristic of all peoples and civilizations of the world, such were the features of the mythological thinking of people of antiquity. However, for some reason, not about all ancient cultures, enthusiasts suggest contacts with aliens 
- it's just that the level of these cultures is too low, even if in their myths this knowledge and skills were also brought by the gods.
As for the advanced social structure of the Sumerians, which is often referred to as "parliamentary democracy", this is simply not true: those features of communal democracy that the Sumerians had were characteristic of many ancient peoples. In addition, if you read the sources, it turns out that they naturally evolved towards more centralized forms. Regarding the alleged super-achievements of the Sumerians in metallurgy, medicine, chemistry, and so on, these are also just allegations that are not supported by historical data. The Sumerians used not a ternary, but a sexagesimal number system, the number "60", which really was of key importance for their arithmetic calculations, is not found in either symmetrical or asymmetric ternary number systems. Finally, the planet Nibiru is also a fiction - modern research has not revealed the presence of such a celestial body in the solar system, and numerous "predictions" that Nibiru should pass dangerously close to the Earth have already been frustrated several times - simply nothing happened within the specified time frame .
There are enough mysteries and truth
Although all this does not mean that the Sumerians really are not a very mysterious civilization. Of course, the main question for historians is where the Sumerians came from to Mesopotamia and what is their ethnic origin - since the Sumerian language has not yet been able to identify their linguistic family ties. But there are enough mysteries in the archeology of Sumer. The loudest of them is connected, perhaps, with the burial complex on the territory of Ur, one of the Sumerian city-states. So, among archaeologists and history buffs, the tomb of a certain Sumerian very noble woman who lived around the 25th century BC is well known (most likely a queen, but there are versions about the high priestess of some deity).
This tomb is notable for several reasons. First, it differs in its design from other tombs of the same period. Secondly, it is the only one where the remains of a person buried in the central part of the complex, that is, directly the "owner" of the tomb, were preserved. Why this is not typical for other burials is unclear. Thirdly, the woman, whose name, by the way, different specialists read in different ways (Shub-ad, Puabi, Nuabi), was accompanied by more than twenty women who, apparently, were poisoned - there are no signs of violent death. Fourthly, the burial is rich in jewelry made of gold and semi-precious stones. There is another interesting point: according to the reconstruction of the appearance carried out by the researchers, the buried woman had such a specific appearance during her lifetime that the discoverers of the tomb did not dare to make this reconstruction public, using the wife of one of the archaeologists as a model wearing jewelry from the grave.
More than 6 thousand years ago, in the region of Mesopotamia, out of nowhere, a unique civilization of the Sumerians appeared, which had all the signs of a highly developed one. Suffice it to mention that the Sumerians used the ternary counting system and knew the Fibonacci numbers. The Sumerian texts contain information about the origin, development and structure of the solar system.
In their depiction of the solar system, located in the Middle East section of the State Museum in Berlin, the Sun is at the center of the system, surrounded by all the planets known today. However, there are differences in this image of the solar system, the main of which is that the Sumerians place an unknown large planet between Mars and Jupiter - the 12th planet in the Sumerian system! The Sumerians called this mysterious planet Nibiru, which means "crossing planet". The orbit of this planet is a highly elongated ellipse, crossing the solar system every 3600 years.
The next passage of the Niber through the solar system is expected between 2100 and 2158. According to the Sumerians, the planet Niberu was inhabited by conscious beings - the Anunaki. Their life span was 360,000 Earth years. They were real giants: women from 3 to 3.7 meters tall, and men from 4 to 5 meters.
It is worth noting here that, for example, the ancient ruler of Egypt, Akhenaten, was 4.5 meters tall, and the legendary beauty Nefertiti was about 3.5 meters tall. Already in our time, two unusual coffins were discovered in Akhenaten's city of Tel el-Amarna. In one of them, an image of the Flower of Life was engraved right above the head of the mummy. And in the second coffin were found the bones of a seven-year-old boy, whose height was about 2.5 meters. Now this coffin with the remains is exhibited in the Cairo Museum. In Sumerian cosmogony, the main event is called the “celestial battle”, a catastrophe that occurred 4 billion years ago and changed the appearance of the solar system. Modern astronomy confirms the data on this catastrophe!
A sensational discovery by astronomers in recent years has been the discovery of a set of fragments of some celestial body with a common orbit corresponding to the orbit of the unknown planet Nibiru.
Sumerian manuscripts contain information that can be interpreted as information about the origin of intelligent life on Earth. According to these data, the genus Homo sapiens was created artificially as a result of the use of genetic engineering about 300 thousand years ago. Thus, perhaps humanity is a civilization of biorobots. I’ll make a reservation right away that there are some temporary inconsistencies in the article. This is due to the fact that many dates are set only with a certain degree of accuracy.
Six millennia ago... Civilizations ahead of their time, or the mystery of the climatic optimum.
The deciphering of Sumerian manuscripts shocked the researchers. Here is a brief and incomplete list of the achievements of this unique civilization that existed at the dawn of the development of Egyptian civilization, long before the Roman Empire, and even more so Ancient Greece. We are talking about the time about 6 thousand years ago.
After deciphering the Sumerian tables, it became clear that the Sumerian civilization had a number of modern knowledge in the field of chemistry, herbal medicine, cosmogony, astronomy, modern mathematics (for example, it used the golden ratio, the ternary calculus system, used after the Sumerians only when creating modern computers, used Fibonacci numbers! ), possessed knowledge in genetic engineering (this interpretation of the texts was given by a number of scientists in the order of the version of the decoding of manuscripts), had a modern state structure - a jury trial and elected bodies of people's (in modern terminology) deputies, and so on ...
Where could such knowledge come from at that time? Let's try to figure it out, but let's draw some facts about that era - 6 thousand years ago. This time is significant in that the average temperature on the planet then was several degrees higher than at present. The effect is called the temperature optimum.
The approach of the binary system of Sirius (Sirius-A and Sirius-B) to the solar system belongs to the same period. At the same time, for several centuries of the 4th millennium BC, two moons were visible in the sky instead of one moon - the second celestial body, then comparable in size to the moon, was the approaching Sirius, an explosion in the system of which occurred again in the same period - 6 thousand years ago!
At the same time, absolutely regardless of the development of the Sumerian civilization in Central Africa, there was a Dogon tribe leading a rather isolated lifestyle from other tribes and nationalities, however, as it became known in our time, the Dogon knew the details of not only the structure of the Sirius star system, but also owned other information from the field of cosmogony.
Those are the parallels. But if the Dogon legends contain people from Sirius, whom this African tribe perceived as gods who descended from heaven and flew to Earth due to a catastrophe on one of the inhabited planets of the Sirius system associated with an explosion on the star Sirius, then, according to the Sumerian According to texts, the Sumerian civilization was associated with immigrants from the dead 12th planet of the solar system, the planet Nibiru.
According to Sumerian cosmogony, the planet Nibiru, not without reason called "crossing", has a very elongated and inclined elliptical orbit and passes between Mars and Jupiter once every 3600 years. For many years, the information of the Sumerians about the dead 12th planet of the solar system was classified as a legend.
However, one of the most amazing discoveries of the last two years has been the discovery of a collection of fragments of a previously unknown celestial body moving along a common orit in a way that only fragments of a once single celestial body can do. The orbit of this collection crosses the solar system once every 3600 years precisely between Mars and Jupiter and exactly corresponds to the data from the Sumerian manuscripts. How could the ancient civilization of the Earth have such information 6 thousand years ago?
The planet Nibiru plays a special role in the formation of the mysterious civilization of the Sumerians. So, the Sumerians claim to have had contact with the inhabitants of the planet Nibiru! It was from this planet that, according to the Sumerian texts, the Anunaki came to Earth, "descending from heaven to Earth."
The Bible also supports this assertion. In the sixth chapter of Genesis there is a mention of them, where they are called niphilim, "descended from heaven." The Anunaki, according to Sumerian and other sources (where they had the name "nifilim"), often mistaken for "gods", "took earthly women as wives."
Here we are dealing with evidence of the possible assimilation of settlers from Nibiru. By the way, if you believe these legends, which are quite numerous in different cultures, then humanoids not only belonged to the protein form of life, but were also so compatible with earthlings that they could have a common offspring. Biblical sources also testify to such assimilation. We add that in most religions, the gods converged with earthly women. Doesn't the above testify to the reality of paleocontacts, that is, contacts with representatives of other inhabited celestial bodies that occurred from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago.
How incredible is the existence of beings close to human nature outside the Earth? Among the supporters of the plurality of intelligent life in the Universe there were many great scientists, among whom it is enough to mention Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky and Chizhevsky.
However, the Sumerians report much more than the biblical books. According to Sumerian manuscripts, the Anunaki first arrived on Earth about 445 thousand years ago, that is, long before the emergence of the Sumerian civilization.
- 9009Some firmly believe in the progenitors of mankind - Adam and Eve. Others insist that old Darwin was right: man descended from a monkey, and it is unlikely that he was called by his first name and patronymic. But the archaeologists who conducted excavations on the banks of the Euphrates in 1927 were ready to swear that the first people were called Sumerians.
Four thousand years before the birth of Christ in southern Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates (the territory of modern Iraq), a people appeared who called themselves the Sumerians, or "black-headed". Where did they come from, or at least what race they belonged to? Their appearance, language, culture were completely alien to the tribes that lived in those days in Mesopotamia. Moreover, the Sumerian language is not related to any of the languages that have survived to this day!
However, the writing they invented - cuneiform, in which signs are squeezed out with a stick (stylus) on a tablet of raw clay, quickly spread to the entire Mesopotamia and became the main writing system of the ancient states of the Middle East. And this is far from the only thing that other peoples could learn from the Sumerians. Think about it: back in the fourth millennium BC, the Blackheads had and effectively operated a bicameral parliamentary system consisting of elected deputies, citizens' committees for self-government, a jury trial, a taxation system, schools, and even the Farmer's Almanac!
Having barely settled in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians rushed right off the bat: they began to dig canals, bring water to the fields, organize an irrigation economy, and establish shipping. Formerly stunted lands blossomed to the envy of their neighbors! But no one dared to go to war with them, on the contrary, the Sumerians moved deep into the Mesopotamian plain, conquering or building cities. Temples were necessarily built in each of them. They were so tall that their flat roofs seemed to rest on the sky. Windows in the Sumerian temples were not cut through, the light penetrated through openings under the roofs and entrances in the form of arches. The walls were decorated with reliefs, which in fact were not decorations at all, but were stories carved on stone about the life of the Sumerians. A kind of textbooks in stone. Even today, in the 21st century, they could be safely reprinted already on paper: volumes on pharmaceuticals and herbal medicine, collections of proverbs and sayings, encyclopedias on chemistry, astronomy and mathematics. The Sumerians used a complex number system based on a combination of the numbers six and ten. In the modern world, such began to be used quite recently, with the advent of computers.
For a long time, scientists admired the knowledge of the ancient Sumerians in the structure of the solar system - they say, they made only two small inaccuracies: they called Pluto a satellite and claimed that a certain planet Nibiru (“Crossing”) rotates between Mark and Jupiter. And what do you think, recently astronomers have recognized: no Pluto is a planet, but between Mars and Jupiter there really once was an orbit of a large planet, from which only fragments remained ...
Where did the people, who lived at a time when most people on Earth only mastered the hoe, get such a deep knowledge of the cosmos?! There is an opinion that the Sumerians are not at all the descendants of Adam or, God forgive me, chimpanzees, but the creation of the hands of aliens. And these are not the inventions of modern ufologists in the style of The X-Files, but the own conviction of the "blackheads". They believed that 445 thousand years ago, the Anunaki flew from that very planet Nibiru (the word is translated as “descended from heaven to Earth”). Their homeland faced an ecological problem: the atmosphere became thinner and thinner, the inhabitants were threatened with death from lack of air, and only a shield of gold particles could save them.
At first, the Anunaki tried to extract precious metal from the waters of the Persian Gulf, then they began to develop a mine in Southeast Africa. About 300,000 years ago, they were so tired from hard work that they rebelled, and their intellectual elite had to come up with a replacement for them. As a result of genetic manipulations, special workers were created - Homo sapiens, intelligent creatures that look like their creators, only shorter. Those who arrived from Nibiru were truly titans, giants, both wise and physically beautiful. Over the years, people and the Anunaki became so close that they even had a common offspring - the Sumerians.
Fantasy, fairy tales of Sumerian grandmothers, collective nonsense? Meanwhile, archaeological research has confirmed that gold mines were indeed actively developed in South Africa during the Stone Age. And the flattering inhabitants of the Zulu pass on the legend from generation to generation that they worked in the mines of creatures made of flesh and blood, artificially created by huge gods who descended from the sky.
One day the Anunnaki flew to Nibiru, never to return. In vain did the Sumerians build high temples with flat roofs, that is, platforms for landing spaceships. Their creators failed to save their native planet with the help of a golden shield, but they gave birth to a new civilization on Earth. To ensure that the knowledge of the Anunaki did not disappear, high-class specialists, priests, selected from the general mass of the Sumerians, should have been selected. To become a priest in Sumer could only be a person with a high intellect and appearance without a single flaw, who vowed not to divulge the secret of the Gods. The first priest among earthlings was Enmeduranki, whose name means "Ruler of ME, who binds Heaven and Earth" ("ME" is translated as "main laws"). The Anunaki gave Enmeduranki a tablet with the secrets of Heaven and Earth, taught them to count by numbers, discovered the knowledge of "water and oil", that is, medicine, and predicted the future.
The main test that awaited the Sumerians ahead was the Flood. Modern people are used to thinking that the story of the Flood is one of the chapters of the Old Testament. Whether or not to believe the Bible is a personal matter for everyone, but it should be noted that the Sumerians told the world about this global catastrophe long before the time when the Jews were in Babylonian captivity, and Noah allegedly built his Ark. “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, or “About Who Has Seen Everything,” says that once there lived among the Sumerians a man named Utnapishtam, who had the honor of saving people and animals from the flood. He built a ship that was in the form of a cube with a rib length of 60 meters, six floors ten meters high each. He filled the compartments inside the ark, of course, with “every creature in pairs.” And although Utnapishtam was a real hero, he did not become the main character of the poem "About the One Who Has Seen Everything." It was not the struggle of man with the water element that worried the wise Sumerians, but his struggle with himself.
One can see in the Epic of Gilgamesh perhaps the oldest literary work in the world, a treasury of the poetry of ancient Sumer. And you can cite his plot as an example of true male friendship. However, meticulous researchers do not stop there. For them, the two heroes of the epic - Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu - are representatives of different branches of human development on Earth. Gilgamesh is the creation of the Anunaki, a resident of the metropolis they created, moreover, a king, and Enkidu is a child of earthly nature. Gilgamesh is an intellectual, a man at the same time selfish, arrogant, spoiled by power, Eikidu is physically strong and simple-minded. Having met, such different people inevitably had to enter into a confrontation, but who won in it? The epic claims that Enkidu. He took Gilgamesh away from urban civilization, into the steppe, into the mountains, so that he would realize the true destiny of man on earth. And then the powerful and beautiful goddess Ishtar entered the arena of narration. She offered Gilgamesh everything he dreamed of - power in the whole world, untold wealth and even immortality. I dreamed, but before meeting Enkidu. Now he did not hesitate to reject the gifts of Ishtar. Moreover, he burst into a diatribe against the goddess - how dare you enslave a freedom-loving horse ?! Why did she turn the gardener into a spider, leaving him nothing but hopeless slave labor?! Was there really nothing more to teach people than to set traps for the king of animals - the lion?! Just yesterday, Gilgamesh was only interested in the fate of wildlife as a source of food, beautiful furs and gold, and today he has turned into a God-fighter rebel! Knowing perfectly well under whose influence the metamorphosis occurred, the gods (and the Sumerians called the gods of the Anunaki) killed Enkidu. But Gilgamesh cannot be stopped, he went to the underworld to restore his friend's life. Alas, the gods shared many things with human beings, but not immortality.
Although the Sumerians were endowed with remarkable intelligence and invented everything that could be invented from the wheel to the state system, they did not twitch on Earth for a long time. From the most ancient and mysterious civilization of the world, only fragments of bricks, ashes from fires and several thousand clay tablets, written in undeciphered cuneiform, remained.
And the solution to cuneiform began. To fully decipher it, larger inscriptions were needed, in which there would be a greater number of personal names for comparison. And such inscriptions were on the Behistun rock (the territory of modern Iran, about 100 km west of Hamadan), which is a record of the victories of King Darius I (reigned 522 - 486 BC). At a height of about 100 meters, over 1000 cuneiform characters were carved on huge stone slabs attached to the rock. The text consists of a large inscription and a number of small inscriptions. The large inscription is divided into three texts with the same content, written respectively by three types of cuneiform writing in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian.
Each part of it consisted of more than 500 lines, which also gave room for comparison. It was truly a treasure. We read this inscription, deciphered dozens of cuneiform characters. The work was completed and published in the journal of the Asiatic Society in London.
The publication of the Behistun inscription made it possible not only to finally understand the ancient Persian cuneiform, but also to begin to decipher the Babylonian cuneiform. This cuneiform script was used to write the second text of the Behistun inscription on the same rock. Its deciphering made it possible to guess the pronunciation of words, the meaning of which could be assumed from the parallel Old Persian text of the inscription.
Later, archaeological excavations brought more and more cuneiform texts. In some places, even whole libraries of clay tablets were found. The value of cuneiform writing for science is enormous. Thanks to the deciphering of cuneiform writing, the world of the Ancient East became better known to us, revealed many of its secrets, and made it possible to get to know the history, culture and life of the most ancient civilization more closely.
